The highly controversial art impresario Walter Smerling is planning a new exhibition. From April 19th, the digital art show “Dimensions” will be on display in the Pittlerwerke in Leipzig, a former industrial complex. But less than the art itself, the main sponsor of the exhibition will be debated: it is the company Palantir Technologies, which was founded by the far-right billionaire Peter Thiel with the help of a CIA investment fund.
Smerling has been organizing large, privately organized exhibitions for years, for which he wins private companies as sponsors. However, the shows are almost always supported directly or indirectly with public funds. Resources that public institutions can often only dream of. This was also the case with Smerling’s most controversial project to date, “Diversity United”, which could be seen in 2021 in two hangars of the former Berlin Tempelhof Airport. It was also heavily criticized that, in addition to Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin was also one of the patrons of the exhibition.
A spokeswoman for Smerling asserts that the Leipzig exhibition will be financed purely privately. In addition to Palantir, Deutsche Telekom is also a sponsor, which has long been said to want to work more closely with Palantir. The big data company Palantir became known because secret services used Palantir software for surveillance. However, Palantir’s customers include NGOs such as the World Food Program and civil corporations such as Ferrari, Merck and Airbus. Recently there has been debate about “Palantir Gotham”, an analysis tool used by American security agencies for predictive policing used and has been criticized for its sometimes racist predictions. The police authorities in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia also use Palantir Gotham, and the program is currently being examined in Bavaria. On February 16, the Federal Constitutional Court declared regulations in Hesse and Hamburg “on automated data analysis for the preventive fight against criminal offenses” to be unconstitutional.